Kraut-shock

Phew - I'm tired today.  We got back from Berlin yesterday afternoon and I've been in a coma since.  This is strange and unhelpful when you consider I've done nothing but eat and sleep well since touching down in Blighty.  We weren't late or anything.  We got home at 5pm.

I am really spent however.  I think it's a combination of physical fatigue and boredom.  I really really really am bored.  Screaming ab-dabs self-harm bored.  I know I am the master of my own ship and should apply my talents (such as they be) to changing matters for the better.  But I can't be our-souled.  So there.

I have another day off tomorrow.  Missus O and I have to attend to matters with a couple of friends of ours that I'm not at liberty to discuss until this time tomorrow.  The cloak-and-dagger miasma makes the whole episode sound vaguely sinister and sordid.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It's a joyous and sober event.  You'll just have to read tomorrow's entry for full details.  Actually, I might not get the opportunity to scribble an entry tomorrow, but I will do soonest.

All I can think of at the moment is going home, curling up into a ball and sleeping like a lttle pigeon.  Not the stuff of which legends are made, is it?  I don't have the energy to argue the point.  Perhaps some modernist poetry would help?  No, I thought not either.

What was I up to then?

Unusually for a Sunday, I went to bed early last night.  The missus and I met her parents, who were in town for the weekend, and had a slap-up lunch.  A couple of glasses of wine and two lovely courses left us both feeling replete and soporific.

We managed to stay awake long enough to pop out in the early evening for an additional brace of sherries, and that was that.  Come 10.30, I was flagging like an RAF ground crew member during the Berlin airlift, so I ran upstairs and  leapt into bed at speed, both feet off the ground, like Roy Keane in his pomp.  I was asleep in a heatbeat.  It was with some surprise and disappointment then that I awoke this mornng feeling shattered.  I had slept solidly for eight hours, which I consider to be my side of the bargain kept.  So what happened to the quality of my sleep during those many small hours?  I must have been thrashing about the whole time, like a giant confused fish.  Perhaps it was the mushy peas that set me off?

Today is a trying day, work-wise, which has added to my woes.  I'm alone in the office and there's loads of exacting, mission-critical work to wade through.  The upshot is a tired, gittery self.  I'm not at my best when T&G, not even close.  Expansive and loquacious is my metier.  And that is thin on the ground this afternoon.

A routine matter.

I think I may finally have divined the root of my lifelong ennui and general dislike of matters societal: it's routine.  The business of routine I mean, not it's straightforward, the divination.  I don't know why this didn't dawn on me sooner.  I hated routine as a child.  It's my first real memory if I'm honest.

You can see the problems this brings one.  Every part of modern life is subject to the jackboot of routine.  From nursery onwards, we're taught to operate within very narrow confines and constraints.  I railed against this development as a nipper.  Prior to going to nursery at the age of three, I spent my time at home with my mother, in an completely improvised and most enjoyable protracted playtime.  Why wouldn't I hate the agencies of routine, then?  They wrenched me from this joyous, ambling life and tried to force me to conform to their bourgeois version of reality.  In their joyless world, play was to be enjoyed in predetermined and regular bursts.  "Playtime's over, children."  "Whoa, hang on a sec, I'm really breaking new ground with this Lego sculpture; I can't stop now."  

I hated being told when and what to eat, when and what to play, when to come and when to go.  I assumed in my preschool naivete that everyone felt the same, but no - most people seemed to like strictures.

The problems continued into secondary education of course, intensified even.  I did find some succour at university.  I could sleep when I wanted and work when I wanted.  What these three years taught me is that I am very productive and very diligent when allowed to be.  I also wasn't beleaguered by chronic fatigue, as I was at school and am now.  The reason for this is not that I slept too much, in the usual lazy sitcom parody of studenthood, but that I was able to retire only when tired.  That meant I could sleep and rise 7 hours later, feeling rested.

Sleep, apart from this brief hiatus, has always been a problem for me.  The reason?  The notion that you must immediately go to bed adds unhelpful psychological pressure to the situation, which is guaranteed to ruin matters.  So even if you are tired, you'll struggle.  It's a bit like trying to have sex with a hectoring partner who continually shrieks "GET A HARD-ON.  QUICKLY NOW - I'M WAITING" as soon as you've pulled your socks off.  That's not going to help, believe me.  Nor, if you're reading this, is trying to slap some life in the offending organ whilst simultaneously tutting and rolling your eyes.

So, the theoretical solution to my ills is clear: shatter routine.  But how does a man with a square job, like me, do this?  Answers on a postcard please.  I do my best at the weekends; I wage a guerrilla war against routine.  I go out of my way not to have appointments in the dairy at the weekend, and this extends to not meeting friends in the pub.

Now, anyone who knows me even vaguely well will wrinkle the brow at this.  Normally, I adore the pub, and can think of no better environment in which to while away my hours, but on a Saturday night it's that enforced and carefully demarcated window thing again.  We'll meet at 9pm and stop at 11.30.  There's no scope for things to develop in an organic way.  There's no distant horizon to gaze at.  The whole enterprise lacks romance.

That's it I suppose - I'm a romantic.  I must remember to explain this to the missus when I get home.  "I'm too romantic, which is why I've resigned from my job."

And...collapse

So, the first day back at work after a busy and vee-enjoyable bank-holiday weekend, and don't I know it.  I slept like a corpse last night.  Usually, it takes me at least three hours to drop off, but last night I genuinely don't remember a thing between kicking off the memory-foam slippers en route to the mattress and the alarm clock screaming its tits off at 7.20 this morning.  The bedside lamp was still on when I woke up, implying that I must have fainted rather than fallen asleep in the traditional manner.

Despite all the shut-eye, I was super knackered right from the bully-off.  I managed to get through the rituals of breakfast and dressing myself on instinct and caffeine alone, but quickly ran out of juice.  I even had to have a lie down before leaving the house.  I'm no general practitioner, but that cannot be right, can it?  I really should have 'phoned work and told them to sod off, but that's not the kind of attitude that gets you on the Apollo Program, is it?

I am no stranger to chronic fatigue.  I blame my bio-rhythms, which are all-to-cock when compared with polite society.  When they're preparing for bed, I'm settling down in front of an episode of Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" with a half a bottle of rioja and a bag of monkey nuts for company.  I've always been like this.

When I was boy, we had a cat called Tibby.  I remember heading-off for school one morning.  There was snow on the ground, and as I mooched forlornly off I spotted the Tibster curled-up in front of the gas fire in the front room, utterly oblivious.  "You jammy get," I remember thinking.  I could have wept.

 In fact cats have a rare old time of matters generally, don't they?  The favourable shift-patterns notwithstanding, they are the masters of their own ships in every conceivable way.  I sometimes look at dogs, and feel sorry for them.  They're like children: they go out when they're told to; they're always accompanied by an adult, and they can't feed themselves.  I often look at my friends' chocolate Labrador and sense her thinking "I could absolutely murder a sausage."  She's got more chance of flapping her ears and taking off, the poor cow.

Your cat, on the other hand, is like an undergraduate: he comes and goes as he pleases, sleeps 14 hours a day and eats when and what he wants.  If a cat wakes up hungry and it's several hours before the Whiskas gets an airing, he simply leaps out window and bags himself a pigeon or a tit.

Long Weekend in Nod

Following on from my dream recollections yesterday, I bypassed the whole scenario last night and fell into a dreamless fatigue and red wine induced coma. Unfortunately my usually reliable catholic guilt let me down for once and I slept through the alarm, which meant having to start the day with a well crafted lie.

I am a good liar. There's no point in my being coy about it. I have an incorrigibly plausible manner. I discovered this quite early in life. I would make up something outlandish to amuse my school friends, and they'd (to my amazement) lap it up like mother's milk.

The temptation to use this skill for evil is huge, and one is always straddling the border between good and bad. It can make me appear withdrawn and brooding at times, like a bullshit Batman. It can also cause people to question my (genuinely) good intentions. Take my boss for example. Let's call him Commissioner Gordon for the sake of argument. I told Commissioner Gordon a bare-faced untruth this morning to explain my lateness, and he believed it. What's more, he wanted to believe it. We all crave narrative completion - disclosure followed by closure. And I did him the honour of creating a back story to the lie. He felt loved and I dodged a bullet - a victimless crime.

If there are any keen amateur liars reading this, the back story is critical. Otherwise your fib is like the faux cowboy town in Blazing Saddles: from the hilltop, it works, but as soon as the baddies ride into the valley, you're screwed.

I May Be Some Time

Well, we've returned intact from our weekend's camping. It was a fairly uneventful trip. There was a real ale festival at the pub on the site. (For non-British readers, real ale is traditional form of British beer. It's delicious, but it does tend to attract joyless, bearded obsessive types. They're usually harmless unless you get talking to one about hop varieties, in which case you're likely to experience a virtual stroke due to boredom.)

However, I'd forgotten how cold it gets in England at night. The days were nice enough, but as soon as the sun went down, it got seriously chilly. I went to bed each night wearing all my belongings, and I was still frozen solid. And it was a real battle of wills to overcome the urge to urinate in the small hours. I had to lay it on the line to my bladder and central nervous system: we're going nowhere until daylight, so roll over and get some sleep. Also, some of our neighbours thought it might aid the sleeping process if they sat up all night inexpertly playing a shrill banjo. It's a testament to how much beer I'd stuck away that I was able to zone out the extraneous noise and get ten hours solid dreamless a night. I'm not by nature a deep sleeper. At home, the sound of dust settling is usually enough to disturb me.

In the news today I see serial offender Joey Barton has got it all over his shoes again. He was sent-off yesterday for confusing football with greco-roman wrestling. When his manager, Alan Shearer, questioned the wisdom of his commitment to the game, he got the right royal hump. Anyways, the upshot is he's been suspended by the club (again).
Now I don't believe I'm betraying any great confidence when I say that Barton's got history in this department. Everyone outside the game appears to realise that he has (ahem) issues with authority, and that he'll fly off the handle as inevitably as night follows day, and yet clubs are queueing up to buy him. They always argue that he's turned over a new leaf or at least deserves another second chance. Someone will give him a job if Newcastle sack him, and he'll be okay for about ten minutes before getting the red mists again. What does he have to do to get sacked? Take hostages or organise a drive-by? Even if he did either of these, he'd be employed again because between assaults, he's a decent footballer. This dubious logic doesn't extend to other professionals thank God or Fred West would still be in work. Yes, he murdered a few, but look at the quality of that grouting.